Today I got a very disappointing note in my inbox, from the US National Libraries RDA Test Project. I guess I’d call it a “ding” letter, and I have to say it was more than a bit surprising. I had volunteered to help with the testing, not by creating records, mind you, but in analyzing the records other people create. Given the fact that I’ve been the co-chair of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, done the major part of the work in registering the RDA schemas and vocabularies, and have been involved in building the XML schemas that will be the basis of much of the data creation for many early RDA implementations, I figured my experience might come in handy. But apparently not …

Dear Diane: Thank you for your interest in the US National Libraries RDA Test project. The RDA Test Steering Committee regrets that you could not be selected as a formal test participant. Interest in the project was much greater than the Steering Committee originally anticipated, and it was necessary to select test partners from more than 90 applications. Every applicant had a great deal to offer to the project, and each was carefully considered. The Steering Committee based its final selections on the goal of ensuring that the RDA Test will reflect a cross-section of US cataloging agencies balanced by size, type of organization, OPAC and cataloging systems used, and areas of specialization in cataloging and collection development.

The Steering Committee will share the methodology for the test on its Website at URL . If you are interested in conducting your own test of RDA, we encourage you to produce records following this methodology and to share the results with the Steering Committee during the test period.

Thank you again for your interest in the RDA Test.

So, exactly what are they testing that makes my knowledge and experience useless? Darned if I know. But I can’t get beyond the notion that the testing regime I see described on the website is pretty limited, and it’s hard to imagine what the results can really tell us, aside from the obvious difficulties people will encounter in attempting to cram a FRBR-based structure into any one of our current flat MARC-based library systems.

Much more interesting, to me anyway, is the idea of what RDA records might look like in straight XML or RDF, without the necessity of the contortions involved in making it all “fit” into a MARC system. Without the layer of MARC contortion we might really be able to figure out whether catalogers could adjust to RDA and create FRBR-based records. It would be nice to think that some of the open source systems would find a way to play with these records and test some more forward-looking, rather than backward-looking implementation issues.

Any volunteers for an alternate testing regime?

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